Monday, March 25, 2013

Congrats to Joe and team at Nathan Love...
can't wait to see more of this!

I got the chance to have a little instant message discussion about the project... thought I would share that here..

How was the schedule for the Hawaiian puch job ?

pretty good. character animation went really fast, but we spent more time on the VFX fruit smash in the middle ..we did a one day shoot for that too high speed fruit cannon!

did they shoot digital? phantom ? red ?and did you really have a high speed fruit cannon ?how many takes till they got the smash to work ?

alexa [camera] for platesand phantom to shoot the elementsyeah, it was crazyoh man, we shot all daybut we did it individually , one fruit at a time and then composed the shot in post we shot liquid bladders exploding too had to microwave the pineapple for two hours to get it to explode

so was any of the liquid in the "smash" shot CG ?

we did a lot of RnD, but in the end it was all live-action elements that we shotoh, and the wave took some time to develop all cg, obviously

any special techniques for the wave,,, I'm guessing it was "rigged" with particle fx on top ?

exactly

how was it developing a 3d version out of the 2D character.. was there a lot of back and forth with "Hawaiian Punch" or did they let you roll ?

well, they had already developed the "3d" look of the character before they came to us - for use on all their labelsbut even then - LOTS of back and forth to nail his character

awesome, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule for this mini interview

I also got the chance to chat with the FX expert Santosh Sailesh from VRAM FX , who was responsible for the wave crests and splash wipe http://www.vramfx.com/

so how was the wave done, and the foam?

so as for the wave..I had them animate the base geothen did loads of particle passesfor the top of the wave I had a system emitting particles based on curvature and those particles emitted maya fluids which in turn emitted millions of particles which was then rendered in real flow render kit. there is also a particle layer which is meshed in realflow. for the trails the same technique was used... initially stamping static point clouds to know where to emit from... then these points emitted maya fluids which emiitted millions of particles rendered with real flow render kit. as for the camera front wipe ..that was all realflow quite a straightforward setup there the reason the other stuff were handled this way was so I could swap in geo cache and all particle passes can be iterated in few hours and rendered overnight

can you tell us more about VRAM , and how you work with companies?

Vram FX is a NY based "virtual" studio specializing in visual effects for feature film and television. Founded in 2008, Vram employs seasoned professionals from all over the world to tackle any problem that may arise in the FX production pipeline. We can act as your front line effects studio, helping you scale up to take on jobs that might otherwise not seem feasible, or we can do the behind the scenes work that allows you to better utilize the talent on hand. Either way Vram wants to be a part of your creative process and help create groundbreaking content in this fast moving, ever changing industry.